Fortnite Reveals Huge Player Numbers

Over 8 million people around the world play Fortnite at any given time.

(CCM) — Epic Games has taken the gaming world by surprise by announcing that its hugely popular Fortnite game now has over 8.3 million concurrent players.

To get that in perspective, that is more concurrent players than the total of all the people playing all the games on Steam combined, a Next Web report points out.

The popularity of the game has exploded over the last few months: earlier this year Epic announced that Fortnite had 3.4 million concurrent players — already a very high number — so its concurrent player base has doubled in less than a year.

The report adds that in the last quarter alone gamers have streamed nearly 19 million hours of Fortnite from streaming software provider Streamlabs. This figure is five times higher than the number of streaming hours for League of Legends, its second most popular gaming title.

The 8.3 million concurrent player figure was revealed by an Epic Games rep to coincide with the launch of Fortnite in South Korea. The country is an important games market, so it likely that Fortnite's player numbers will continue to increase sharply in the coming months.